Nuances of Repetition

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I stumbled across a little nuance in how we talk about repeated actions. I stumbled across a little nuance… ok, too obvious.

When we use a noun (Esperanto O-word) that names an action, we usually talk about a single instance of that action, and we can talk about several using the plural form.

Let’s roll with eĥo (echo), because ĥ is an under-appreciated letter (pronounced like the ch in Scottish loch).

Eĥo

A single echo

Eĥoj

Echoes – more than one echo

But in Esperanto, we also have access to the suffix “ad” (click to see related posts), which implies that an action is repeated or continual:

Eĥado

A long echoing, or several echoes together at a time.

What if we went full-on and pluralised that too? What then?

Eĥadoj

Several long echoes, or several times when echoes were repeated.

What happens is that we talk then of several long echoings or several points when echoes were repeated! Makes sense. I’d never really thought about comparing plurality with repeatedness, so I thought that was interesting! (check out the inspiration source at PMEG).

And I hope you’re enjoying as much as me the fact that an “echo” in itself is also a repeated sound, so we’ve got repeats inside repeats…

Whenever I talk about a word I tend to do a dictionary dive, and I wanted to also share something I found when reading up on eĥo:

Seneĥe

Echolessly

An example usage might be:

La krio seneĥe velkis

The cry echolessly faded

It’s just a joy to pronounce 🙂

In favour of numberable

Photo by Igor Ovsyannykov from Pexels

If you’re anything like me, you often sit pondering the nature of countable nouns. The countability, or enumerability, of things is an important consideration – despite my spellchecker refusing to acknowledge it.

This is the idea that some nouns name individual things that one could count, and yet others name things whereby the quantity is unspecified or arbitrary, a non-individual thing or substance. And we use these nouns slightly differently. For example, with countable nouns like “squirrel”, “house”, and “tree”, we can talk about them like this:

There are two squirrels in a house.

But that would sound mega weird with uncountable nouns like “water”, “sand”, or “milk”:

There are two sands in a milk.

Because those are not countable; talking about one or more of them is a bit strange. There are some uncountable nouns, like “metal”, where we do sometimes use the plural to refer to many types of that noun (rather than individual instances). For example:

She held in her grasp two metals.

This does not mean two bits of metal, this means two types of metal.

This is all largely the same in Esperanto, with the same words you’d expect. But there is an interesting word-building quirk to be aware of!

When we make words with the aĵ suffix, we make a concrete thing to do with the root word. For example: “utila” means “useful”, and “utilaĵo” is a “useful thing”.

And the quirk to be aware of is that words produced in this manner can frequently make sense as either countable or non-countable nouns, and you’ll find them in both uses. One example that PMEG discusses is “produktaĵo”. The verb “produkti” means “to produce” so “produktaĵo” is a thing which is produced, and can be countable or non-countable depending on context. It is like the difference between English “product” and “produce”, where “product” names individual countable things, but we talk about “produce” as we would “water”:

Kiam vi kolektos la produktaĵon de la tero…

When you have gathered the produce of the land…

Sciuroj importas 75% de siaj produktaĵoj

Squirrels import 75% of their products.

Most of the time, context is gonna show you which you’d want to translate it as. And obviously the plural “j” is often a dead giveaway that we’re being countable. But sometimes, the sentence might be short enough that the meaning could go either way, the PMEG gives:

Li lavis tolaĵon

Countable: He washed a linen (e.g. item of clothing made of linen)
Uncountable: He washed linen

Pretty neat!

By the way, the Esperanto for “to count” is “nombri” from “nombro” (number). So “countable” is “nombrebla”, which is pretty delicious in my books. It’s inspired me to prefer “numberable” in English over all the other pretenders: countable, numerable, enumerable…

One Neat Trick

To -i or to -ado

Photo by Emre Öztürk on Unsplash

What’s the difference between tricking and tricking? Or “trompi” and “trompado”?

For those unfamiliar with the suffixes, “i” is the base form of a verb, the dictionary form, the infinitive. So trompi means “to trick” – no sense of time/tense. Notice how when we want to put it in e.g. present tense in English we lose the “to”, and even sometimes add an “s”: “he tricks the squirrel” (present tense in Esperanto: trompas). But we use this base form under some circumstances, e.g. “he loves to trick squirrels” (“loves” is doing our tense work).

The “-ado” suffix has a few purposes, but the one I’m interested in here is using it to create the noun (or name) of an action from the action verb. So for example “trompi” is a verb meaning “to trick”, but “trompado” is a noun, so we can talk about “the tricking” of something, in a nouny way. E.g. “the tricking of squirrels is no simple matter”. If you want to learn a bit about Esperanto root words, and making them nouns/verbs/adjectives here’s an old blog post.

So lets compare this the usage of “trompi” and “trompado” below as closely as we can:

1.

la ruzaj meloj amas trompi sciurojn

the cunning badgers love tricking (to trick) squirrels

2.

la ruzaj meloj amas trompadon de sciuroj

the cunning badgers love the tricking of squirrels

In both cases, we’ve got the revelation that this particular clan of badgers enjoy squirrels getting tricked. But you may see the difference between these two sentences even from the English: in example 1, we’re suggesting that what the badgers enjoy is doing the tricking themselves, but in 2, we make no such implication; we’re suggesting that the badgers find enjoyment regardless of who is performing the tricking. And that’s exactly the difference in the use of -i and -ado here! The -i form always implies a subject doing the action, and it’s usually the same subject as the verb it’s working with (here “amas”), but -ado is independent of subject. Neat huh.

This post was inspired by this PMEG page, where you’ll also find the following quote, which demonstrates fluidly the flexible neatness of Esperanto participles.

Aga O-vorto nomas agon sen konsideri eventualan faranton

An action O-word names an action without considering a potential do-er (i.e. one who might do the action)

To me, “sen konsideri eventualan faranton” is a construction that flows so neatly in Esperanto, but always feels like a stumble in English. As you can see in my translation, I either resort to the informal “do-er”), or I have to spell out the exact meaning laboriously “one who does the action”. I could perhaps strain and use other terms like “actor”, but it feels clunky, and it’s nice to be able to derive my meaning from the base word that’s already appropriate: “do” (fari).

Learn more about Esperanto participles from my old series on them: https://adventuresinesperanto.wordpress.com/category/esperanto-quirks/partying-with-participles/.